Tuesday, May 13, 2003

Working Class Hero

An irony impaired fellow in the comments section to this post, criticized The Farmer, one of the very best blog commenters around, for his assumed "Connecticut" liberal elitism in writing a humorous mash note to GW Codpiece stalker, "Jessica."

I had planned to respond to this fellow's post by prosaically stating that my only complaint about The Farmer was that he didn't post here enough.

I'm glad I didn't because The Farmer himself wrote a stunning autobiographical tone poem in response. Here is a taste. I urge you to read the whole thing:

[...]

Do you know anything about old timey drugs Mike? You will need to know some things about old timey drugs and guns and time clocks and crippling parasitic poverty to play spin the bottle with some of this crowd Mike. What do ya think Mike? Are you up for a wild ride on the frayed ragged edges of the rusty American dream? I can deliver you up a road trip through the American wheat field that will take the wrinkles out of you JC Penny Dockers, Mike. Take my word for it. Take my word for it again. I have been down the road and back. I have fucked the homecoming queen Mike. Have you ever fucked the homecoming queen?

And I have even sat myself down for dinner with members of the Bush family in a pretty tropical cafe on a pretty tropical island with twinkle lights dancing like stars in a canopy of sea grapes too...and I have read the collected writings of Robert Motherwell and Alvaro Muti and climbed to the top of the Washington monument and thrown sticks to a black dog in the surf at Muir beach. I have burned my own dining room furniture in a woodstove, for warmth following an unusual freak nor-easter, and bailed friends out of jail and sat in hospital waiting rooms as children were born. And watched the lights in the sky being sucked into a hole in the clouds from a Castilian style balcony overlooking a small town. Have you ever had to burn your dining room furniture for warmth in the cul-de sac, Mike?

Mike. I now buy my chickens from a rural Christian homstead family who lived in a tepee for an entire winter while they built their own home from scatch. (And an ugly contraption it is) But, who cares, they did it themselves and because they raise their animals humanely..I don't care what their fantasitical religious views are, and they don't bother me with em. Good for them and me. Oh Mike....you have no idea what is going on out here in the outback. Not a clue. Trailer parks..hahahahaha.. oh yeah, Mike, trailer parks across America are blooming with satellite dish enlightenment, Mike. Sure they are. When was the last time you were anywhere near one?

I once sat in a small boat on a lake on the Western Range of the Colorado Rockies, in the middle of what they like to call no-where, gliding on a lake as calm as melted glass and watched as tens of thousands of bats emerged from caves and descended onto that lake like starlings from an autumn sky only to clatter and flit by me completely unimpressed. While I watched dumbstruck. Tens of thousands of living things keyed, by God, or perhaps not, to go wherever they had to go....and to do what they had to do.

Anne Dillard once wrote this:

"There is a way a wave rises above the ocean horizon, a triangular wedge against the sky. If you stand where the ocean breaks on a shallow beach, you see the raised water in a wave is translucent, shot with lights. One late afternoon at low tide a hundred big sharks passed the beach near the mouth of a tidal river in a feeding fenzy. As each green wave rose from the churning water, it illuminated within itself the six - or eight-foot-long bodies of twisting sharks. The sharks disappeared as each wave rolled toward me; then a new wave would swell above the horizon, containing in it, like scorpions in amber, sharks that roiled and heaved. The sight held awesome wonders: power and beauty, grace tangled in a rapture with violence."

Think about that Mike. Anne Dillard is onto something there.

I am an American Mike.....I am like one of those sharks, roiling and heaving... forgotten America, Mike. I am working America, Mike....a scorpion in a watery amber glass. A tangle of life twisting in an illuminated wave rolling onto the beach of a new century. Tangled in some forgotten power and grace and horrible unrealized violence. So batten down your so called beloved trailer park hatches Mike. There may be a storm a comin. I'll leave it up to you to save us from oursleves.